Master of One
by Lindra
Summary: The greatest cause of death within Lantean and Wraith societies is suicide.' Character study of Todd the Wraith; spoilers through Season 4 of SGA. Second in a series.


**I shall warn for 'depressing'. Second in my Master series centering around Todd the Wraith.**

**I.**

The greatest single cause of death within Lantean society is suicide.

So it is among Wraith.

Of course, neither species are given to documenting their weaknesses, and there are none left to be told of the understanding which drove them to such measures. For Lantean, such a truth is a reason to despair. For Wraith, anger.

Wraith have been so very angry so for so long.

He wonders if perhaps the Lantean way told of greater wisdom.

**II.**

Doctor McKay speaks of it once, an idle thing to distract his mouth as his hands and mind are occupied: he understands the impulse to tell falsehoods, that some sightcaster may grant her mercy and listen to a tale intended to spare her hand. It is foolish nonetheless.

'You can't have killed all the Ancients, though,' he begins as though it were a continuation of a conversation, long ago. 'There were a ton of them, and no offence, but you're hardly the exception where hardiness is concerned, and it's not like they fought foot battles, and their tech - the thing about their tech, they don't need much manpower. I can account for some hundred thousand, maybe a couple hundred more if I really stretched it, but the rest -' He makes a gesture poorly illustrative of ephemeral life, an ill-cast facet of a truth deeper than young acknowledge. 'Where the hell did they go? They can't have all Ascended.'

'They fled,' is all he will allow himself to say, obvious, obscured by its own simplistic surface. This way, he does not lie.

The answer in its fullness is not one Doctor Doctor Rodney McKay is capable of comprehending.

**III.**

Humans, due to their short lifespan, treat friendship with far less respect than it deserves and more loyalty than it warrants.

After some sixty thousand years, grievances are worthless, blood kin diluted: as all are your children, so are theirs yours in kindness. Bonds dissolve. Constructs, be they a steel of dissociated beauty as the Lanteans preferred, or the dense growflesh of Wraith, discover themselves the subject of disrepair. Death, as always, is dealt with an even hand and welcomed by all. There is no peace in its accomplishment; only an end.

He has felt the grief of long, enduring friendship as one left of two to know its persistence, its lack: why must you have done this to me, my friend, only in your greed to imprint yourself as surety that you shall not be forgotten?

Memory is not a blessing.

**IV.**

Lanteans had been acquaintances, once, and their city was not unwelcoming of Wraith presence. Many hours he has laid in lesiure in the confines of an acquaintance's quarters speaking of useless things, many days exercising spirit and flesh in the open spires misted in the morn and low confines rocking amid unsettling depths of saltwater, many moonrises greeted by his lazy back against a balcony with a flagon of wine to share between he and his friend beside him. He knows the many Lanteas well, the original and her replicas, her outposts and her dominions.

The humans revere Lantea, speak of her as a sightcaster to protect them, and this is what he first knew of John Sheppard, the first he saw him: he knew Lantea, and did not see it for what it was not, and did not see it for the truth of its angularity. He spoke of his friends with the understanding within himself that to speak of his team was to speak of Lantea: doomsayer, prophet, goddess.

Wraith, as Lantean, turn elsewhere for comfort. Goddesses are extant, and care little for that which does not concern them; the gods apply themselves to their small amusements of plagues, the beautiful energies within galaxies unmemorable. That which is produced with intelligence is found lacking in time; that which is garnered by emotion is found abstract in age. The only constant companion is oneself, and all answers are to be found there, if only one has the sight to see.

Live long enough and all cages, within and without, become unpalatable.

**V. **

This is the difference: that which Lanteans deconstruct, they rebuild as an untruth they speak to themselves in hopes it will tell them of a delight they may grasp, enduring.

That which Wraith use has always been found: they do not deconstruct, they do not destroy, they are not a wasteful species. That which they find they recreate, as itself or as a mirror of itself or in yet another image altogether.

Humans do not understand that to _feed_ is to _make_.

**VI. **

Teyla of Athos he knows well, though they have not shared speech. Intricacy such as hers is a rare gift of circumstances and bloodlines such as they have come to be, and to himself he will confess that the familarity she holds is comforting. The child she possesses is not one to be afraid of in blending power and its practices: sightcasters such as she, weakness become ability, are a boon. As her teachings are just, so shall her child exercise justice.

Though there be times he wishes to tell Teyla of Athos of his best and favourite daughter, of his Lantean bondmate's grace scribed within his daughter's laughter as it is within Teyla's, power luminous and delightful, he does not and will not speak of it. He bears the knowledge. She has but to acclimate to her own nature and grasp such truths as they were for herself. Should she attempt, he will not deny knowledge of her ancestors. It is her birthright.

**VII.**

He thinks that if the humans would simply allow themselves sexual contact with each other, they would be far more inclined toward temperance. He knows the symptoms of famine, and they are not attributes he cares for.

**VIII.**

In truth, he had not intended to take the codes Rodney McKay guarded so fiercely. The Lantean database and their pathetic attempts at cataloguing it amused him such that he perused its contents while waiting for yet another simulation to inform them that their solutions were no solutions at all.

It was simply a combination of overhearing the right conversation among his guards, the distracted openness of McKay's mind accessed through his habit of thoughtlinking with every being around him, and the Lantean datascreen to trigger thoughts of the 'midway' in McKay's mind. He will not apologise for his greater intelligence.

They suspect him; however, his dishonesty was forced against his wishes. He is fortunate Wraith put far too much worth into the spoken names of humans, and far too little into understanding the things humans attempt to conceal. He does not care to repeat the experience nor speak of it. Thus, the Lanteans will not understand their position or its precarious dangers, and he is content to allow their ignorance.

There are worse things.

**IX.**

He is the Wanderer; he is the Star-Eyed; he is the Truthsinger; he is alone. In companionship, in battle, in healing, the artifice of physical bonding in a rare moment between battles, boredom, bereavement, he is alone. In memory and in the present, in the past and in the premonitions of what will come, he is alone, first and eldest. In Lantea, at the tallest tower with a warrior woman of great arrogant strength that yet cannot support his weight of years however tight her arms wrap around him, he is alone.

This loneliness is the stifled whisper of an abandoned city; this despair is the despair of a broken wineglass in a set of two; this awareness is the cold awareness that as stars end and suns burn, as planets implode and terraform, as galaxies twist and shape to the gaping maws at their centers, they who were never meant to live with this fearful immortality go ever on and on and on.

Eternity breeds arrogance. Arrogance breeds contempt. Contempt breeds pessimissim. Pessimissim breeds misanthropy. Misanthropy breeds distance.

This is how Lanteans ascend; this is how they come by madness. He has often thought they are one and the same. Only their grasp of the world around them changes, as though more power constrained by yet more rules will give them the strength to hold their spirits within themselves.

Wraith have no ascension to escape to, simply madness, and only keep it at bay with the strength of themselves and their own continuity: their sorrow is that of the hive, the hive is their conduit, and their anger gives rise to hollow, echoing spaces, black walls of angry flesh curving above their heads to reflect that which they have become, predators without ease, ever-hungry and ever-searching.

To Wraith, change is that with the power to take away all that imparts the possibility of hope, all that which balances and steadies the mind however young or old, all that which leads to the right path of mindfulness and spirit and knowledge to keep oneself awake, aware, awash with possibility and probability.

As far as Wraith fear their immortality and hunger, they fear far more the workings of those who are as yet mortal, who do not yet understand that to live as long as they do is to be so close to infinity as to make no difference at all. The nine thousand years of young carry little difference to his nine million.

For those who do understand this, for those who are driven mad by change forced upon them, Wraith or Lantean or both: there can be only forgiveness and the compassion of death.

He both fears and pities the one called Michael for this. He is a creature alone, so alone, and without his hive, without his queen to embrace him, without a brother to tell him his body is his own, he knows his loneliness and tries to escape it while knowing that he will not and never will succeed. However many he creates to be like himself, however strong and fierce their intellect, however powerful his control, they will know his loneliness and carry none of it.

Lanteans should never have thought to meddle with weights and burdens they were incapable of understanding.

**X. **

As among humans, so it is among Wraith that humour, while it neither forestalls or advances misery, is something of a relief from the sadness one finds when it comes to pass that all one's children, all one's children's children, all one's once-future dreams, are as dust and breathing steel.

Like so.

_What is a human?_

_Kin. _


End file.
